Write to your legislator

A letter from a constituent in the district counts for more than a signature from anywhere else. This one is written and ready. Make it yours and send it.

How to send it

1. 01

   Find out who represents you

   Your Assemblymember and your State Senator are different people, and either can author the resolution. The Legislature’s own lookup takes your street address and gives you both, with their contact forms.

   We ask for your street address nowhere on this site, and we deliberately do not guess your district from a ZIP code. ZIP boundaries cross district lines, and writing to the wrong member wastes your letter.

   Look up your representatives →
2. 02

   Make the letter yours

   Everything in square brackets needs replacing, and the paragraph in the middle is the one that matters most. Staff sort constituent mail by whether a real person wrote it. A form letter is counted. A letter with three sentences of your own in it gets read.

   Your letter Dear [their name], I live in [your city], in your district, and I am writing to ask you to author a Joint Resolution establishing a blue-ribbon commission to study California sovereignty. I want to be precise about what I am asking for, because this subject attracts a lot of noise. I am not asking you to endorse independence. I am asking you to support an inquiry. A commission would examine what independence would actually involve, publish what it finds, and let Californians judge the evidence for themselves. [Two or three sentences in your own words about why this matters to you. This is the part a staffer will actually read, so it is worth writing badly rather than not at all.] The case for studying the question is straightforward. California is one of the largest economies on earth, and the questions people ask about its future get answered with assertion rather than evidence, on every side. Federal benefits. Water. Trade. The military installations. The debt. A commission would replace that with a public record. The resolution has already been drafted, so a member who takes it up is reviewing a finished document rather than starting from a blank page. Supporting an inquiry does not commit you to its conclusions, and I would not ask you to pretend otherwise. I would be glad to know your position, either way. Sincerely, [your name] [your street address] [your city], CA [your ZIP]

   Edit it here. Nothing you type is sent to us or leaves your browser.

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3. 03

   Send it, and say who you are

   Paste it into your member’s contact form, or post it. Include your address either way. Offices weight mail by whether the sender lives in the district, and an unsigned message from nowhere in particular is filed accordingly.

   Posted letters take longer to arrive and are harder to ignore when they do. If you have the stamp, use it.

If you get a reply

Send it to [email protected], including a refusal. Knowing which offices are engaging and which are not is how we work out where to concentrate, and a polite no from a member is more useful to us than silence from a hundred.